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by HobbitSpaceCase



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Original Trilogy, Star Wars Prequel Trilogy
Genre: Anakin Skywalker is also a mess if we're being honest, Anakin is Confused and Distressed, Gen, Obi-Wan Kenobi Needs a Hug, Obi-Wan Kenobi is a Mess, Obi-Wan's Infinite Sadness, Obi-Wan's sad hut on Tattooine, Unexplained Time Travel, Unresolved Ending, aka his baseline state of being
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-11
Updated: 2020-10-11
Packaged: 2021-03-08 00:00:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,510
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26956243
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HobbitSpaceCase/pseuds/HobbitSpaceCase
Summary: Five years later, and the days dripped by in carefully constructed monotony, each one like a grain of sand - unremarkable and insignificant when taken alone, but taken together had built around him a barren wasteland hiding dragons he dared not disturb beneath the sun-bleached surface.Five years into his exile on Tattooine, Ben Kenobi receives an entirely unexpected visitor.
Relationships: Obi-Wan Kenobi & Anakin Skywalker
Comments: 6
Kudos: 98





	Home

The last thing Ben Kenobi expected to see when he shuffled out of his small dwelling into the heat of twin suns that barely peaked over the dunes early one morning - no greater plans for yet another unassuming day nearly five years into his exile from all that he once knew than a routine check of the elderly but still perfectly serviceable vaporator hidden in the shadows of a rocky outcropping on the opposite side of the narrow canyon from his door - was the ghost of a man five years dead. Not just any man, either. A companion, a partner, a dear and cherished friend, a _brother_. A man who had been all of those things and then somehow, impossibly, both all and none of them at once, by the end.

(Five years later, and the days dripped by in carefully constructed monotony, each one like a grain of sand - unremarkable and insignificant when taken alone, but taken together had built around him a barren wasteland hiding dragons he dared not disturb beneath the sun-bleached surface.)

"Oh," Ben said, the soft exclamation startled out of him at the sight of his impossible guest across the canyon, only a few meters away from his vaporator. "So I am going mad, then." For he had heard as well, several times just this past year, the voice of his old Master Qui Gon Jinn, carried on the winds over the sands and whispered in his ear while he clutched desperately for the elusive remnants of peace and hope that often still slipped through his fingers like smoke during his daily meditation.

(Like smoke off the Temple spires, curling away from the battlefield that once he had called home, like ash rising from spitting magma that consumed the screaming heart and soul of Obi-Wan Kenobi.)

The once great Negotiator, reduced to a creeping lonely shadow and dying by degrees every day, with only the dead to bring him comfort. His funeral rites would be sung by the winds through the canyon and the roaring scream of a Krayt dragon on the hunt, the silent vigil of the stars all that remained to watch over his grave. He has fallen so far, in the wake of his Fallen brother's crimes.

The ghost across from him startled equally at his voice. A mess of confusion crossed that so familiar face (so _beloved_ , even after everything that had passed between them), before it settled on a scowl - the exact one which, he recalled against the painful thumping of his aching heart, had often been used to cover up uncertainty or fear brought on by a situation he did not understand.

"What the kriff is going on, Obi-Wan?" the ghost asked, and _oh_.

Ben remembered that voice, as well, those grinding-growling tones that had signified his anger, an anger that had grown and grown over the course of the War until it had consumed everything else in a once bright and hopeful young man. An anger that had resulted in the shining supernova of his Light collapsed into a black hole from which no Light would ever shine again. An anger that Obi-Wan Kenobi had never been able to help his dearest, most cherished brother release, no matter how he had tried in his own helpless way.

Grey, shadowed eyes slipped closed against the onslaught of grief that surged within his heart, every bit as sharp and fresh as the day that Ben Kenobi was born from Obi-Wan's ashes. How was he meant to help a _ghost_ \- a phantom brought to life by a lonely, sun-touched mind - tame its anger, when he had already failed his brother so spectacularly?

"Obi-Wan?" that voice said again, more gently this time, and Ben flinched as a bright presence he only allowed himself to remember in the secrecy of dreams (the sort of dreams that left him wishing never to wake up, the ones that left him lost in forbidden contemplation of things carried in the small chest tucked away in a corner of his little hut when he inevitably blinked awake each new day, one of which in particular might let him realize his longing for a true and final peace) brushed up against him.

Ben felt that presence grow stronger as the ghost drifted closer, strangely hesitant for a figment of his addled imagination. Ben kept his eyes closed against the temptation to look, to find other ways in which the phantom differed from the man he had known so well (or perhaps had not known at all, to be so blindsided by that final and devastating betrayal). His brother had once been many things - volatile and reckless and blinding in his passions, to name but a few - but only very rarely had he ever been hesitant or gentle after the awkwardness of their first few years together.

"Please, Obi-Wan," the voice said, its words lengthened and sharpened by a new note of desperation, “talk to me. I was _just_ on Coruscant, but now I'm on Tattooine and _you're_ here but you look _old_ , and I really don't know what's going on."

(None of them had known what was going on, not until it was too late, and hadn't that been just the problem? They had not talked, they had not looked, and so they had all paid the price of their ignorance. They had fallen to the betrayal of brothers, fallen to the implacable march of the Dark.)

The small hairs at the back of Ben's neck prickled as the ghost rose a hand to touch him, only to retract it before flesh and phantom could connect. It was entirely possible, Ben supposed - in the single distant corner of his mind that was not overwhelmed with howling grief or fritzing static like a busted holocomm - that the way he had flinched back against his door at the (impossible) warmth that radiated from the ghost's fingers over his shoulder, felt even through the worn fabric of his robes, might have caused their withdrawal. He was not entirely certain whether he was grateful or grieved that he did not, therefore, know what would have happened if the outstretched hand had reached its intended target - that he did not know if it would have felt solid and real where it clasped his shoulder in an imitation of friendliness, or if it would have passed right through him and shattered the illusion of _his_ presence on its way.

"I'm sorry," he said to the ghost in front of him. His voice was soft and hoarse with years of disuse, and his tongue stumbled over the syllables that once had torn themselves from his throat over and over again as he cried out his grief, as he begged the silent stars and the unforgiving dunes and the grave of a woman whose son he had failed, for an absolution that he neither expected nor deserved. He opened his eyes, unwilling and simultaneously desperate to look upon the face that still haunted all the shadowed corners of his shattered heart, five years behind him and never more than a single thought away, his soul forever tethered to a past forever gone. 

Eyes as blue as the sky above their heads (not yellow and blazing like twin suns, full of hate and rage on a planet made of heat and grief and loss) met his blinking gray gaze, a thin scar set in sun-reddened but otherwise unblemished skin framed by riotous golden curls. His brother - _Anakin, Anakin, Anakin,_ chanted his foolish heart to the rhythm of its every painful beat - stood in front of him, worry and irritation in the squint of his blue _blue_ eyes and the frown of his chapped and bitten lips. He slowly lifted the hand not still holding him up with a white-knuckled grip on his door, and laid it like a benediction over the place where Anakin's heart leaped against his ribs in frantic counterpoint to Ben's stumbling pulse.

Those ribs did not yield to the touch of his fingers, that oft-remembered face did not waver and fade like a mirage approached too closely. The flesh in front of him was solid, as real as the stone at his back. Soft fabric over firm muscle and hard bone contrasted against desert-dry skin that stretched too thin over the delicate bones of his hand, laid featherlight and trembling over that impossibly beating heart.

"Oh, Anakin," he whispered around the lump that scraped like sand where it lodged in the dry hollow of his throat. "I have missed you, _so much_." Anakin's mouth opened, perhaps to admonish Ben for the wetness that blurred his vision - an unforgivable and utterly ridiculous waste of water, he knew, even as the tears carved dusty rivers along the deep canyons that lined his face - but any words were lost to the ringing in his ears. He blinked, and shuddered, and had only a moment longer before the darkness claimed him, to hope that _this_ dream would stay with him when he inevitably awoke alone once more.


End file.
